Reviewing the OpenStack services

Getting to the meat and potatoes of what makes up OpenStack as a project would be to review the services that make up this cloud ecosystem. One thing to keep in mind in reference to the OpenStack services is each service will have an official name and a code name associated with it. The use of the code names has become very popular among the community and most documentation will refer to the services in that manner. Becoming familiar with the code names is important and will ease the adoption process.

The other thing to keep in mind is each service is developed as an API driven REST web service. All actions are executed via that API, enabling for ultimate consumption flexibility. Even when using the CLI or web-based GUI, behind the scenes API calls are being executed and interpreted.

As of the Newton release, the OpenStack project consists of six of what are called Core Services and thirteen Optional Services. The services will be reviewed in order of release to show an overall services timeline. That timeline will show the natural progression of the OpenStack project overall, also showing how it is now surely Enterprise ready.

A great recent addition provided to the OpenStack community is the creation of Project Navigator. The Project Navigator is intended to be a living guide to the consumers of the OpenStack projects, aimed to share each of the services community adoption, maturity, and age. Personally, this resource has been found to be very useful and informative. The navigator can be found here on the OpenStack Foundation website, www.openstack.org/software/project-navigator.

OpenStack Compute (code-name Nova)

Integrated in release: Austin

Core Service

This was one of the first and is still the most important service part of the OpenStack platform. Nova is the component that provides the bridge to the underlying hypervisor used to manage the computing resources.

Note

One common misunderstanding is that Nova is a hypervisor in itself, which is simply not true. Nova is a hypervisor manager of sorts, and it is capable of supporting many different types of hypervisors.

Nova would be responsible for scheduling instance creation, sizing options for the instance, managing the instance location, and as mentioned before, keeping track of the hypervisors available to the cloud environment. It also handles the functionality of segregating your cloud into isolation groups named cells, regions, and availability zones.

OpenStack Object Storage (code-name Swift)

Integrated in release: Austin

Core Service

This service was also one of the first services part of the OpenStack platform. Swift is the component that provides Object Storage as a Service to your OpenStack cloud, capable of storing petabytes of data, in turn, adding highly available, distributed, and eventually consistent object/blob store. Object storage is intended to be cheap, cost-effective storage solution for static data, such as images, backups, archives, and static content. The objects can then be streamed over standard web protocols (HTTP/S) to or from the object server to the end user initiating the web request. The other key feature to Swift is all data is automatically made highly available as it is replicated across the cluster. The storage cluster is meant to scale horizontally just by simply adding new servers.

OpenStack Image Service (code-name Glance)

Integrated in release: Bextar

Core Service

This service was introduced during the second OpenStack release, and it is responsible for managing/registering/maintaining server images for your OpenStack cloud. It includes the capability to upload or export OpenStack compatible images and store instance snapshots as use as a template/backup for later use. Glance can store those images on a variety of locations, such as locally and/or on distributed storage, for example, object storage. Most Linux kernel distributions already have OpenStack compatible images available for download. You can also create your own server images from existing servers. There exists support for multiple image formats including Raw, VHD, qcow2, VMDK, OVF, and VDI.

OpenStack Identity (code-name Keystone)

Integrated in release: Essex

Core Service

This service was introduced during the fifth OpenStack release. Keystone is the authentication and authorization component built into your OpenStack cloud. Its key role is to handle creation, registry, and management of users, tenants, and all the other OpenStack services. Keystone would be the first component to be installed when standing up an OpenStack cloud. It has the capability to connect to external directory services such as LDAP. Another key feature of Keystone is that it is built based on role-based access controls (RBAC). Allowing cloud operators to provide distinct role-based access to individual service features to the cloud consumers.

OpenStack Dashboard (code-name Horizon)

Integrated in release: Essex

This service is the second service to be introduced in the fifth OpenStack release. Horizon provides cloud operators and consumers with a web-based GUI to control their compute, storage, and network resources. The OpenStack dashboard runs on top of Apache and the Django REST framework. Making it very easy to integrate into and extend to meet your personal use case. On the backend, Horizon also uses the native OpenStack APIs. The basis behind Horizon was to be able to provide cloud operators with a quick overall view of the state of their cloud, and cloud consumers a self-service provisioning portal to the clouds resources designated to them.

Tip

Keep in mind that Horizon can handle approximately 70% of the overall available OpenStack functionality. To leverage 100% of the OpenStack functionality, you would need to use the API's directly and/or use CLI for each service.

OpenStack Networking (code-name Neutron)

Integrated in release: Folsom

Core Service

This service is probably the second most powerful component within your OpenStack cloud next to Nova.

OpenStack Networking is intended to provide a pluggable, scalable and API-driven system for managing networks and IP addresses.

This quote was taken directly from the OpenStack Networking documentation as it best reflects exactly the purpose behind Neutron. Neutron is responsible for creating your virtual networks with your OpenStack cloud. This would entail creation of virtual networks, routers, subnets, firewalls, load balancers, and similar network functions. Neutron was developed with an extension framework, which allows for integration from additional network components (physical network device control) and models (flat, Layer 2, and/or Layer 3 networks). Various vendor-specific plugins and adapters have been created to work inline with Neutron. This service adds to the self-service aspect of OpenStack, removing the network aspect from being a roadblock to consuming your cloud.

With Neutron being one of the most advanced and powerful components within OpenStack, a whole book was dedicated to it.

OpenStack Block Storage (code-name Cinder)

Integrated in release: Folsom

Core Service

Cinder is the component that provides Block Storage as a Service to your OpenStack cloud by leveraging local disks or attached storage devices. This translates into persistent block-level storage volumes available to your instances. Cinder is responsible for managing and maintaining the block volumes created, attaching/detaching those volumes, and also backup creation of that volume. One of the highly notable features of Cinder is its ability to connect to multiple types of backend-shared storage platforms at the same time. This capabilities spectrum also spans all the way down to being able to leverage simple Linux server storage as well. As an added bonus, quality of service (QoS) roles can be applied to the different types of backends. Extending the ability to use the block storage devices to meet various application requirements.

OpenStack Orchestration (code-name Heat)

Integrated in release: Havana

This was one of the two services to be introduced in the eighth OpenStack release. Heat provides the orchestration capability over your OpenStack cloud resources. It is described as a mainline project part of the OpenStack orchestration program. This infers that additional automation functionality is in the pipeline for OpenStack.

The built-in orchestration engine is used to automate provisioning of applications and its components, known as a stack. A stack might include instances, networks, subnets, routers, ports, router interfaces, security groups, security group rules, Auto Scaling rules, and so on. Heat utilizes templates to define a stack and is written in a standard markup format, YAML. You will hear of those templates referred to as HOT (Heat Orchestration Template) templates.

OpenStack Telemetry (code-name Ceilometer)

Integrated in release: Havana

This is the second of the two services introduced in the eighth OpenStack release. Ceilometer collects the cloud usage and performance statistics together into one centralized data store. This capability becomes a key component to a cloud operator as it gives clear metrics into the overall cloud, which can be used to make scaling decisions.

Tip

You have the option of choosing the data store backend to Ceilometer. Such options include MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, HBase, and DB2.

OpenStack Database (code-name Trove)

Integrated in release: Icehouse

Trove is the component that provides Database as a Service to your OpenStack cloud. This capability includes providing scalable and reliable relational and nonrelational database engines. The goal behind this service was to remove the burden of needing to understand database installation and administration. With Trove, cloud consumers can provision database instances just by leveraging the services API. Trove supports multiple singe-tenant databases within a Nova instance.

Tip

The data store types currently supported are MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, and CouchDB.

OpenStack Data Processing (code-name Sahara)

Integrated in release: Juno

Sahara is the component that provides Data Processing as a Service to your OpenStack cloud. This capability includes the ability to provision an application cluster tuned to handle large amounts of analytical data. The data store options available are Hadoop and/or Spark. This service will also aid the cloud consumer in being able to abstract the complication of installing and maintaining this type of cluster.

OpenStack Bare Metal Provisioning (code-name Ironic)

Integrated in release: Kilo

This service has been one of the most anxiously awaited components part of the OpenStack project. Ironic provides the capability to provision physical Bare Metal servers from within your OpenStack cloud. It is commonly known as a Bare Metal hypervisor API and leverages a set of plugins to enable interaction with the Bare Metal servers. It is the newest service to be introduced to the OpenStack family and is still under development.

Other optional services

There are a few additional services still in the early phases of maturity that are listed later. The scope and depth of some of them are still being determined, so it felt best not to possibly misrepresent them here in writing. The bigger takeaway here is the depth of added capability these new services will add to your OpenStack cloud when they are ready.

Code-name	Service
Zaqar	Messaging service
Manila	Share filesystems
Designate	DNS service
Barbican	Key management
Magnum	Containers
Murano	Application catalog
Congress	Governance